Data protection in the Amazon CLI - Amazon Command Line Interface
Data encryption
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

This documentation is for Version 1 of the Amazon CLI only. For documentation related to Version 2 of the Amazon CLI, see the Version 2 User Guide.

Data protection in the Amazon CLI

The Amazon shared responsibility model applies to data protection in Amazon Command Line Interface. As described in this model, Amazon is responsible for protecting the global infrastructure that runs all of the Amazon Web Services Cloud. You are responsible for maintaining control over your content that is hosted on this infrastructure. You are also responsible for the security configuration and management tasks for the Amazon Web Services services that you use. For more information about data privacy, see the Data Privacy FAQ.

For data protection purposes, we recommend that you protect Amazon Web Services account credentials and set up individual users with Amazon IAM Identity Center or Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM). That way, each user is given only the permissions necessary to fulfill their job duties. We also recommend that you secure your data in the following ways:

  • Use multi-factor authentication (MFA) with each account.

  • Use SSL/TLS to communicate with Amazon resources. We require TLS 1.2 and recommend TLS 1.3.

  • Set up API and user activity logging with Amazon CloudTrail. For information about using CloudTrail trails to capture Amazon activities, see Working with CloudTrail trails in the Amazon CloudTrail User Guide.

  • Use Amazon encryption solutions, along with all default security controls within Amazon Web Services services.

  • Use advanced managed security services such as Amazon Macie, which assists in discovering and securing sensitive data that is stored in Amazon S3.

  • If you require FIPS 140-3 validated cryptographic modules when accessing Amazon through a command line interface or an API, use a FIPS endpoint. For more information about the available FIPS endpoints, see Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-3.

We strongly recommend that you never put confidential or sensitive information, such as your customers' email addresses, into tags or free-form text fields such as a Name field. This includes when you work with Amazon CLI or other Amazon Web Services services using the console, API, Amazon CLI, or Amazon SDKs. Any data that you enter into tags or free-form text fields used for names may be used for billing or diagnostic logs. If you provide a URL to an external server, we strongly recommend that you do not include credentials information in the URL to validate your request to that server.

Data encryption

A key feature of any secure service is that information is encrypted when it is not being actively used.

Encryption at rest

The Amazon CLI does not itself store any customer data other than the credentials it needs to interact with the Amazon services on the user's behalf.

If you use the Amazon CLI to invoke an Amazon service that transmits customer data to your local computer for storage, then refer to the Security & Compliance chapter in that service's User Guide for information on how that data is stored, protected, and encrypted.

Encryption in transit

By default, all data transmitted from the client computer running the Amazon CLI and Amazon service endpoints is encrypted by sending everything through a HTTPS/TLS connection.

You don't need to do anything to enable the use of HTTPS/TLS. It is always enabled unless you explicitly disable it for an individual command by using the --no-verify-ssl command line option.